Quick Take
- Narration: Connor Bales narrates his own story, and the pastoral authority and personal intimacy he brings are inseparable from the book’s impact, this is non-negotiable self-narration.
- Themes: Suffering and faith, special needs parenting, theology of caregiving, God’s presence in chronic hardship
- Mood: Tender, honest, and theologically serious, grief given a framework without being resolved away
- Verdict: For readers who bring Christian faith to the question of why suffering happens and how to hold it, this is among the more honest and substantive treatments of disability parenting as spiritual calling.
There’s a question that sits underneath a lot of Christian writing about suffering that most of the writing never quite addresses directly: what if the suffering doesn’t end? What if the framework you’re asking God for isn’t a way through to resolution but a way of living in permanent difficulty with your faith intact? Connor Bales’s book is one of the more honest treatments of that question I’ve encountered, and the fact that he is both a pastor and a father to two children with a rare genetic disorder gives the theology a weight that comes from evidence rather than theory.
I listened to most of this on a quiet Sunday, which felt right for the material. At just under five hours, it’s a single sustained sitting if you want it to be, and Bales narrates his own book with the delivery of someone who has preached this material and lived it in equal measure. The Tozer quote he opens with, it is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply, might sound like a benediction of pain lifted out of context, but Bales uses it as a question to be interrogated rather than an answer to be accepted. That’s the right move for a book that takes suffering seriously.
The Personal Register Before the Theological One
Bales earns the right to the theology by getting the personal account right first. He and his wife Mary have navigated the particular exhaustion of raising children with a rare genetic disorder, the initial confusion and questions of why, the practical exhaustion resulting from endless tests, treatments, and visits to the emergency room, and the emotional, physical, and spiritual toll that accumulates over years rather than arriving in a single crisis. He describes leaving nothing off the table, and the book largely delivers on that promise. The hard passages are genuinely hard. The exhaustion is rendered specifically rather than summarized.
A reviewer who has a special needs child described her hesitation to begin the book, she had assumed it would be a sad and difficult read, which she didn’t want after years already spent in difficulty. She found instead something different: not easy consolation, but honest company. That distinction matters. The book is not optimistic in the sense of telling you it will be fine. It is hopeful in the sense of offering a framework within which difficulty can be held without destroying the person holding it.
What the Theology Actually Argues
The title Counted Worthy comes from Acts 5:41, where the apostles leave the Sanhedrin rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. Bales uses this as the organizing theological claim: that the call to suffer is a calling, not a punishment or an oversight, and that it carries with it a specific form of closeness to God that is unavailable through comfort. This is a demanding theological argument, and Bales makes it carefully. He doesn’t use it to dismiss the difficulty or to suggest that parents of disabled children should perform gratitude for their circumstances. He uses it to locate suffering within a framework that gives it meaning without reducing it to lesson or blessing.
Reviewers who are themselves parents of children with disabilities have described the book with real specificity. One described it as giving her respect for both Pastor Connor and his wife with what they went through and still are, noting that the love for their special needs girls and their other children makes her faith grow stronger. That response speaks to what Bales is attempting: not an argument about the existence of God in the face of disability, but a witness to what faith looks like in practice when it’s under that particular kind of sustained pressure.
Connor Bales Narrating Connor Bales
The self-narration is not a production constraint, it’s what makes the audio version worth choosing over the print. Bales is a pastor, which means he is professionally practiced at delivering material that requires both intellectual content and emotional resonance in a single register. The result is a narrator who sounds like someone working through his own material in real time rather than reading a finished text. There are moments in the harder passages where the delivery shifts slightly, and those shifts carry more weight than any production choice a professional narrator could have made. At under five hours, this is not an overlong listen, and Bales sustains the register throughout.
Audience and Context
This book is explicitly Christian in its framework. The theology is Protestant evangelical, and the framework of suffering as calling assumes the truth of the Christian narrative. This is not a book that will serve readers looking for a secular approach to disability parenting resilience, for that audience, Kelley Coleman’s Everything No One Tells You is a better fit. But for parents of disabled children who are already working within a Christian framework and need something that engages their faith seriously rather than offering hollow reassurance, Counted Worthy is among the most useful titles available in audio.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the rare genetic disorder that Bales’s children have, and does the book explain their specific condition?
Bales does not identify the specific genetic disorder by name, the focus is on the experience of parenting and faith rather than on the particular diagnosis. The content is framed to speak to parents of children with any significant disability or chronic illness, not specifically to those dealing with the same condition.
Is this primarily a theological argument or a personal memoir, and what proportion of the book is each?
Both strands are woven throughout rather than separated. Bales moves between personal account and theological reflection in a way that is integrated rather than sequential. The memoir sections ground the theology; the theology gives the memoir’s harder passages a framework. Neither dominates to the exclusion of the other, which is one of the book’s structural strengths.
Does the book address the experience of the spouse and the broader family, or is it primarily Bales’s perspective?
Mary, his wife, is a genuine presence throughout, Bales writes about their shared experience and does not position himself as the sole subject of the story. The toll on the relationship, on her, and on their other children is addressed, though the perspective is primarily Connor’s since he is the author and narrator.
How does Bales handle the question of why God permits children to suffer, does he offer an answer?
He offers a theological framework rather than a resolution. The book does not claim to answer why a good God permits suffering; it argues instead for a way of holding that question within faith. Bales is honest that the why question does not have a satisfying answer, and his theological work is about sustaining faith in the absence of that answer rather than providing one.
